Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Exactly one hundred years ago, Jung coined the term ‘Analytical Psychology’ to differentiate his theories about the nature and dynamics of the human psyche from those of his compatriot, Freud, and Freudian ‘Psychoanalysis’. Although regarded as a body of thought and therapeutic practice in its own right, Analytical Psychology has continued to encourage and incite dialogue and debate with many other academic traditions and fields of study, beyond its psychological and psychiatric disciplinary origins. Academic research into Analytical Psychology is subsequently found in a wide variety of fields and areas of study—including but not limited to, philosophy, political thought, literature, religious studies, education, sociology, film and media, fine art and art history, neuroscience, quantum physics, environmental studies. Its widespread appeal demonstrates its usefulness in clarifying the nature of our human behaviours and interactions, and for establishing important links between otherwise disparate disciplines.This special issue will show case a range of different applications of Jungian thought and practice, and to that end, we welcome submissions from any disciplinary perspective, and also any academic approach (theoretical, empirical, historical, cultural, or otherwise). Papers are especially welcome that employ interdisciplinary perspectives or reveal the impact of Analytical Psychology on other disciplines or fields of study.

Dr. Lucy HuskinsonGuest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 300 CHF (Swiss Francs).
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Printed Edition Available!

A printed edition of this special issue is available via books.mdpi.com.

Abstract: While conducting doctoral research in social science on late motherhood, two analytical engagements with the feminine came to my attention as evidence of a patriarchal bias toward the realm of womanhood. Jung’s mythopoetic tension between symbolism and enactments with the feminine and Freud’s supposition that a denial of the feminine was necessary for psychological and emotional development appeared to be perpetuating a social problem continuing in current times. Across affective behavior and narrative within stories of late procreative desire, dream journals and Word Association Tests of eight participants was the memory of a male sibling who had enjoyed primacy of place in the parental home over the daughter. The female body with a voice was missing in the one-sided perspectives of Analytical Psychology and Psychoanalysis on the subject of the feminine, until a whole view of psyche’s discontents in Feminist inspired Psychoanalytic theories from both schools on the female body were included. Freud and Jung’s views became evidence of patriarchy as background while extension of Feminist inspired psychoanalytical thinking, Queer theories and Creation Myth allowed new meanings of the embodied feminine to emerge through a recapitulation of a union of opposites as a union of epistemology and ethos. The essence of Jung’s mid-life theories, altered by modernity and eclipsed by female advancement, remains replicatable and paradigmatic outside of essentialist gender performance.

Abstract: Mirrors have been studied by cognitive psychology in order to understand self-recognition, self-identity, and self-consciousness. Moreover, the relevance of mirrors in spirituality, magic and arts may also suggest that mirrors can be symbols of unconscious contents. Carl G. Jung investigated mirrors in relation to the unconscious, particularly in Psychology and Alchemy. However, the relationship between the conscious behavior in front of a mirror and the unconscious meaning of mirrors has not been clarified. Recently, empirical research found that gazing at one’s own face in the mirror for a few minutes, at a low illumination level, produces the perception of bodily dysmorphic illusions of strange-faces. Healthy observers usually describe huge distortions of their own faces, monstrous beings, prototypical faces, faces of relatives and deceased, and faces of animals. In the psychiatric population, some schizophrenics show a dramatic increase of strange-face illusions. They can also describe the perception of multiple-others that fill the mirror surface surrounding their strange-face. Schizophrenics are usually convinced that strange-face illusions are truly real and identify themselves with strange-face illusions, diversely from healthy individuals who never identify with them. On the contrary, most patients with major depression do not perceive strange-face illusions, or they perceive very faint changes of their immobile faces in the mirror, like death statues. Strange-face illusions may be the psychodynamic projection of the subject’s unconscious archetypal contents into the mirror image. Therefore, strange-face illusions might provide both an ecological setting and an experimental technique for “imaging of the unconscious”. Future researches have been proposed.

Abstract: Post-Jungians tend to identify Jung’s dream theory with the concept of compensation; they tend to believe that Jung’s radically open stand constitutes his dream theory in its entirety. However, Jung’s theory regarding dreams was a product of an evolving process throughout his whole intellectual and professional life. Unfortunately, the theory has not been understood in such a developmental light. Based on a historical and textual study of all dream articles found throughout The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, this paper maps a concise three-phase trajectory of Jung’s changing views on dreams and interpretation. The paper posits that Jung’s last essay, “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” (1961), epitomizes his final stand, although such a stand is also reflected in a less explicit and less emphatic way during the latter period of the second phase. The paper also briefly addresses where Jung and Jungians have been enigmatic or negligent. For example, it has not been explicated fully why compensation as slight modifications and compensation as parallels to waking life situations are rare in Jung’s cases In addition, contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to the study of dreams, as represented by Harry Hunt, William Domhoff, and Allan Hobson, among others, are presented in connection with Jung. The juxtaposition of Jungian, cognitive, and neuroscientific approaches showcases how cognitive and scientific findings challenge, enrich, and in some ways confirm Jung’s dream theory and praxis.

Abstract: This paper explores dialogical currents in Jung’s analytical psychology, with reference to contemporary theories of the dialogical self. The dialogical self is a notion that has gained increasing currency in psychology since the 1990s, in response to the limitations of traditional notions of the self, based on monological, encapsulated consciousness. Modern dialogical self theory construes the self as irrevocably embedded in a matrix of real and imagined dialogues with others. The theme of dialogical otherness within the self is also taken up in Jung’s analytical psychology, both in the practice of active imagination and psychotherapy and in the theory of archetypes, and a dialogical approach to inquiry is evident in Jung’s work from the outset. The implications of a dialogical re-conceptualization of analytical psychology and of analytical psychology for dialogical theory are considered in detail.

Abstract: Although C.G. Jung’s interest in normality wavered throughout his career, it was one of the areas he identified in later life as worthy of further research. He began his career using a definition of normality which would have been the target of Foucault’s criticism, had Foucault chosen to review Jung’s work. However, Jung then evolved his thinking to a standpoint that was more aligned to Foucault’s own. Thereafter, the post Jungian concept of normality has remained relatively undeveloped by comparison with psychoanalysis and mainstream psychology. Jung’s disjecta membra on the subject suggest that, in contemporary analytical psychology, too much focus is placed on the process of individuation to the neglect of applications that consider collective processes. Also, there is potential for useful research and development into the nature of conflict between individuals and societies, and how normal people typically develop in relation to the spectrum between individuation and collectivity.

Abstract: Scientific advances made in the 21st century contend that the forces of nature and nurture work together through an ongoing series of complex correspondences between brain and mental activity in our daily activities with others. Jung’s cosmological model of the psyche minimizes the fundamental corporeal condition of human nature and as such is critiqued and amended, influenced by the transcendental materialist theories of subjectivity inspired by Žižek, Johnston and Laplanche.

Abstract: We describe similarities in the ontology of quantum physics and of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology. In spite of the fact that physics and psychology are usually considered as unrelated, in the last century, both of these disciplines have led at the same time to revolutionary changes in the Western understanding of the cosmic order, discovering a non-empirical realm of the universe that doesn’t consist of material things but of forms. These forms are real, even though they are invisible, because they have the potential to appear in the empirical world and act in it. We present arguments that force us to believe, that the empirical world is an emanation out of a cosmic realm of potentiality, whose forms can appear as physical structures in the external world and as archetypal concepts in our mind. Accordingly, the evolution of life now appears no longer as a process of the adaptation of species to their environment, but as the adaptation of minds to increasingly complex forms that exist in the cosmic potentiality. The cosmic connection means that the human mind is a mystical mind.

Abstract: Since the 1990s several research projects and empirical studies (process and outcome) on Jungian Psychotherapy have been conducted mainly in Germany and Switzerland. Prospective, naturalistic outcome studies and retrospective studies using standardized instruments and health insurance data as well as several qualitative studies of aspects of the psychotherapeutic process will be summarized. The studies are diligently designed and the results are well applicable to the conditions of outpatient practice. All the studies show significant improvements not only on the level of symptoms and interpersonal problems, but also on the level of personality structure and in every day life conduct. These improvements remain stable after completion of therapy over a period of up to six years. Several studies show further improvements after the end of therapy, an effect which psychoanalysis has always claimed. Health insurance data show that, after Jungian therapy, patients reduce health care utilization to a level even below the average of the total population. Results of several studies show that Jungian treatment moves patients from a level of severe symptoms to a level where one can speak of psychological health. These significant changes are reached by Jungian therapy with an average of 90 sessions, which makes Jungian psychotherapy an effective and cost-effective method. Process studies support Jungian theories on psychodynamics and elements of change in the therapeutic process. So finally, Jungian psychotherapy has reached the point where it can be called an empirically proven, effective method.

Abstract: The theory of the archetypes and the hypothesis of the collective unconscious are two of the central characteristics of analytical psychology. These provoke, however, varying reactions among academic psychologists. Empirical studies which test these hypotheses are rare. Rosen, Smith, Huston and Gonzales proposed a cognitive psychological experimental paradigm to investigate the nature of archetypes and the collective unconscious as archetypal (evolutionary) memory. In this article we report the results of a cross-cultural replication of Rosen et al. conducted in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. In short, this experiment corroborated previous findings by Rosen et al., based on English speakers, and demonstrated a recall advantage for archetypal symbol meaning pairs vs. other symbol/meaning pairings. The fact that the same pattern of results was observed across two different cultures and languages makes it less likely that they are attributable to a specific cultural or linguistic context.

Abstract: As the leading proponent of psychoanalysis, Jung made trips to New York in 1912 and 1913. The first was to give his Fordham lectures, the second has escaped notice but was crucial in the early dissemination of Jungian psychology in the U.S. This paper will elaborate on this development by highlighting the career and influence of Beatrice Hinkle, the country’s first Jungian psychoanalyst. She was an M.D. and ardent feminist who introduced Jung to her Greenwich Village circle, translated his magnum opus Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, and helped establish the institutional basis of Jungian psychology in America.

Abstract: The behavioral sciences and Jung’s analytical psychology are set apart by virtue of their respective histories, epistemologies, and definitions of subject matter. This brief paper identifies Jung’s scientific stance, notes perceptions of Jung and obstacles for bringing his system of thought into the fold of the behavioral sciences. The impact of the “science versus art” debate on Jung’s stance is considered with attention to its unfolding in the fin de siècle era.